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Video: Hookworms, “Away/Towards”

When I first clicked play on this track from Leeds five-piece Hookworms, I was surprised by how much it brought me back to the music that composers like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca were making in the late '70s, riding all the chance overtones and distortions that occur when you play the same chord over and over again. Then it just exploded into a wailing, existentially flailing, melodic psych rock freak-out that was somehow cathartic across all eight-minutes of its run time; it was anything but minimal, but somehow it also hit me like a single mass of sound, the guitar sounds and the vocal sounds distorted to the point that they seem to be made of the same substance. Ahead of their sophomore LP, Pearl Mystic, which is out September 3 via Weird World, the band just released this video for the track; not all that surprisingly, it features a bunch of people in the woods, performing some sort of shamanic ritual, enigmatic for the fact that it remains unexplained.